ERA09FA235 · Grumman AA-1B
Grumman AA-1B · Accident: fuel starvation en route
From Fairview Airport (33A) to Fairview Airport (33A)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09FA235
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Grumman AA-1B
- Aircraft type
- Grumman AA-1
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N8998L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fairview Airport (33A), Landrum, SCTo Fairview Airport (33A), Landrum, SC
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Fuel starvation
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that the accident airplane flew over his house and the engine sounded as if it was running slowly. The wings were rocking from side to side. As he continued to watch the airplane, the engine stopped running and the airplane descended until it crashed. The airplane impacted the ground in about a 35-degree nose-low attitude. Each wing leading edge had accordion type damage along the entire length. Examination of the fuel tanks found that they were not breached or damaged. The fuel tanks were drained; 3 gallons of fuel were recovered from the left tank and 1.5 gallons of fuel were recovered from the right tank. The recovered fuel included approximately 1 gallon from each tank that the airplane manufacturer considered unusable. The fuel selector was found in the off position. Examination of the airframe and engine did not reveal evidence of a preimpact malfunction or failure. In the month prior to the accident, the pilot was suffering from urinary symptoms that were interfering with his ability to obtain adequate sleep. Toxicology testing indicates that he had likely used at least one prescription sleep aid the night prior to the accident, in addition to relatively recent use of a sedating over-the-counter antihistamine and a prescription barbiturate medication. While the pilot’s extensive experience and the circumstances of the accident indicate the possibility that the pilot may have been distracted by physical symptoms, impaired by fatigue, or impaired by the effects of one or more of the medications he had recently ingested, the investigation was unable to determine conclusively that the pilot suffered from impairment or distraction.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power in flight due to fuel starvation as a result of the pilot's inadequate inflight fuel planning and the pilot's failure to maintain airspeed while descending for a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09FA235
- Event ID
- 20090405X75414
- Case number
- ERA09FA235
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7b24e1ca62689a409b14bdd66d6adf97b12f75cfd8f7125ed7aabb3fd34d3cd4; retrieved 2026-09-13T20:02:18.216Z.